Abstract
The ability to cancel an already initiated response is central to flexible behavior. While several different behavioral and neural markers have been suggested to quantify the latency of the stopping process, it remains unclear if they quantify the stopping process itself, or other supporting mechanisms such as visual and/or attentional processing. The present study sought to investigate the contributions of inhibitory and sensory processes to stopping latency markers by combining transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), electroencephalography (EEG) and electromyography (EMG) recordings in a within-participant design. Active and sham tDCS were applied over the inferior frontal gyri (IFG) and visual cortices (VC), combined with both online and offline EEG and EMG recordings. We found evidence that neither of the active tDCS condition affected stopping latencies relative to sham stimulation. Our results challenge previous findings suggesting that anodal tDCS over the IFG can reduce stopping latency and demonstrates the necessity of adequate control conditions in tDCS research. Additionally, while the different putative markers of stopping latency showed generally positive correlations with each other, they also showed substantial variation in the estimated latency of inhibition, making it unlikely that they all capture the same construct exclusively.
Highlights
The ability to cancel an already initiated response is central to flexible behavior
It should be noted that since correction procedures for violations of sphericity are not well-developed in this framework, instances that fail to meet this assumption will be presented with Greenhouse-Geisser epsilon (ε), the F-value for the corrected degrees of freedom, and the corresponding p-value
To assess the contribution of sensory and inhibitory processing to the latency of stopping, we investigated the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the inferior frontal gyri (IFG) and visual cortices (VC) on different putative measures of inhibitory timing, namely the stop-signal reaction time (SSRT), P3 onset and peak latencies, and the latency of the partial response EMG (prEMG)
Summary
The ability to cancel an already initiated response is central to flexible behavior. While several different behavioral and neural markers have been suggested to quantify the latency of the stopping process, it remains unclear if they quantify the stopping process itself, or other supporting mechanisms such as visual and/or attentional processing. The computational model underlying SSRT estimation makes no assumptions about the processes leading up to the estimated stopping latency This suggests that potential stopping markers could be sensitive to variations in processing stages www.nature.com/scientificreports preceding inhibition, a notion which has been supported by recent computational work[23,24]. Several studies have found decreased SSRTs following anodal stimulation of the IFG30–35, suggesting that this method can alter inhibition latencies Both increased and decreased reaction times in go trials have been reported[10,32,36], indicating that anodal IFG stimulation could potentially influence strategic adjustments of task performance rather than an inhibitory process per se. Investigations of concurrent electrophysiological modulations are sparse, and no one has investigated the effects of anodal IFG stimulation on inhibition at the effector level
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